Knowledge management systems, which are generally known, may be used, for example, to gather information from various information systems within an organization. The knowledge management system may perform one or more processing actions on the gathered information, such as, for example, categorization, full-text indexing, and metrics extraction, etc. Existing knowledge management systems attempt to provide access to large amounts of information in databases on a network or even in personal computers and gather this information for users of the system. However, merely accessing and/or gathering this information has limited value to a user without understanding a relationship between the user and the information.
Existing knowledge management systems typically access and/or gather the information from data sources without knowing or understanding a user's relationship to the information, relationships of the information to other persons or users of the system, and/or relationships that may exist within the information itself. Thus, many times these systems provide the user with irrelevant information. Other times, these systems provide information in such large quantities as to be useless to the user. All the while, an expert in the information unbeknownst to the user sits three cubicles down.
Another problem associated with existing knowledge management systems is the vast array of information available to the user, the number of disparate systems in which this information resides, and the sheer quantity of the information itself. Gathering this information, particularly from among the disparate systems, is a formidable task that many existing knowledge management systems do not effectively address.
These and other drawbacks also exist.